Heat give Dwyane Wade statue a new head
TLDR: Two years after Dwyane Wade's bronze statue outside Kaseya Center got roasted for looking nothing like him, the Heat have fitted it with a new head, and Wade says it's about listening.
No more Laurence Fishburne jokes. The Heat swapped the head out entirely and didn't settle for a touch-up.
NEW: Dwyane Wade’s bronze Heat statue gets a new head to "further capture Dwyane’s likeness" t.co/g9dilunRIe Photos in here of what Wade's statue now (and used to) looks like
Quick refresher on how we got here. The Heat unveiled the statue in October 2024. It made Wade the first Heat player with a statue, and it froze his 2009 game-winner against the Bulls, when he jumped up on the scorer's table and yelled "This is my house." Great moment, great idea. The face was the problem. The internet decided right away it didn't look like Wade, and the comparisons ran from Laurence Fishburne to the infamous Cristiano Ronaldo bust.
The fix is a big improvement. The before-and-after photos are honestly kind of jarring. The old face looked like a distant cousin, and the new one actually looks like D-Wade.
The Miami Heat heard the slander and updated the face on Dwyane Wade’s statue 😅 Before vs After
Credit where it's due on how this was handled. The original artists, Omri Amrany and Oscar Leon of Chicago's Studio Rotblatt Amrany, came back to do the work, and Wade reportedly spent about a year planning the redesign with them. Back in 2024 Amrany defended the piece, saying Wade had been closely involved and "knew exactly what he wanted." So this isn't the Heat firing anyone and starting over. The same team went back and got the face right. Wade made that exact point on his Substack.
Wade posted about the change to the statue on his Substack: "This isn’t about erasing the work that was already done or disrespecting the artists who put their time and talent into creating it. It’s about being willing to listen." t.co/DGVM5Fqhfl
He went further than that, too. Wade wrote that if people don't feel a connection when they look at the face, "why wouldn't we try to make it better?" He added that the 305 deserves to look at the statue and feel the same energy it felt that night in 2009. That's a pretty classy way to admit the internet had a point, and pro athletes almost never do it.
Even the current Heat locker room was impressed by the engineering. Pelle Larsson's reaction was pure wonder about how you even put a new head on a bronze statue:
Pelle Larsson: "How did they do that? I mean, that's crazy. I didn't know you could do that."
Fair question, Pelle. The answer is that you build a plywood box around it, work behind it for a while and then reveal it. What matters is that Miami's best player ever finally has a statue that looks like him. Wade's legacy in that building was never in doubt. Now fans posing for photos out front won't have to squint to see him in the bronze.
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